DC Al Coda
by Butterycrumpets
Summary: In music, a coda comes at the end of the piece. The song is played through to the end, but instead of how the song ended before, how it was meant to end, the musician goes to the Coda.br / I have finished now, John.br / This is my Coda. John is given a diagnosis, told from Sherlock's POV.


I have never understood our collective idolisation of living fast and dying young.

Since my days as a student, even in my wildest dreams I had never imagined myself with more than one person. In the spirit of my ancestors, I planned to live until my dark hair became as the silver rivers of the parochial legends of my youth and my skin crumpled like the bed sheets of Westforth Manor. Sunsets over Roath Lake and quiet evenings indoors by the ornate, renaissance fireplace would have sufficed in making me a perfectly happy old man. As my senses addled, I would give up deductions for something less abstruse, like composition, or history, or beekeeping. For reasons unknown to even myself, I always envisioned someone to share in this picturesque, childlike plan of the future.

I would have had John with me.

Had it not been for the most tragic of events, I would have had him with me.

For the past few months I have had a dream. I never can remember where it begins, somewhere in a haze of happiness and a plethora of pictures and that dance one after the other until he is there with me. His hand, wrinkled as my own. Somehow not even age can divide us in my dream and we are together once more. His canine, Gladstone, stretched out on the rug before us. The window is open just enough to scatter the embers of the crackling fire before I take his hand in my own and silently thank anyone listening that I am with him. We do not fear death because of our lack of faith in a deity, instead it has given us the greatest reason there is to stay alive. I hold his hand in mine. Dreams were the first and last times I was with him.

Had I any belief that somewhere John Watson was still in existence; surely I would have no reason to weep than my own selfishness? I know now that he has gone, slipped away into darkness and nothingness as deep and endless as my own sorrow. He has spoken his last words. There is nothing left for him, and yet I feel as though it were the same for me.

I will never forget that plane ride from Christchurch, New Zealand where I had been investigating a matter which now seems of minute importance, to Manchester where John had been hospitalised.

'Mr Holmes!' the receptionist recognised me, I think partially from my reasonably public job as a private detective and partially from the bedraggled look of horror which screamed 'my partner of ten years just had a seizure out of the blue, I haven't slept in three nights and I've just got off a twelve hour plane ride'.

It is true that I hadn't slept at all, which I would venture to say is hardly strange for me, and the news that John had collapsed didn't exactly help.

John looked so small in that hospital bed. He didn't look at me as he spoke. His voice was cracked and strained like the last notes before a crescendo.

I don't remember what he said, although I remember the feeling of helplessness as I observed the apparent numbness in the left side of his face. His left hand didn't twitch the entire time we sat together either. It was clearly a stroke.

That night, or early the next morning, we received John's MRI results.

Tumours like buds of a weed had blossomed throughout the hemispheres of his brain, setting their roots into his memories and sense of balance.

He was given a month at most, then we were left alone.

I knew I wasn't going to waste a single second with John, and yet as soon as the doctors cleared out of the abysmal little hospital room in which I was planning to spend roughly a month, I suddenly felt utterly exhausted.

The army doctor gave me a knowing smile and told me to sleep, he promised he would still be there when I woke up. I have taken to memorising these words because they were the last he ever spoke to me.

'When did you last sleep?'

'It doesn't matter.'

'It matters to me, you matter to me.' He said in his matter of fact manner.

'Three nights ago.'

He sighed, leaning back in the firm, white hospital pillows.

'I won't be able to sleep with this bloody itching potion they're injecting me with, so don't bother waiting for me to.'

'I don't want to sleep if you're awake.'

He rolled his eyes, no doubt we had swapped ages and I was the younger man staring up at my older, wiser partner.

'I've got a month or so they said, and if you really plan on staying up till November then be my guest, but I won't have you dying before me. Go to sleep, and I'll still be here when you wake up.'

It was the first time either of us mentioned the 'd' word, death, dying, dead, die. But he said it, thus drawing his trump card and silencing me.

I leant back in my strange reclining chair and shut my eyes. Despite my exhaustion, sleep had never felt so far away. Still, I remained stagnant for a good fifteen minutes before cracking an eyelid open.

John was still awake, writing lazily in some journal of his. It looked to be a review of a patient, and I remember feeling distinctly sick that he was continuing on his work even when he knew he wouldn't be there for the operation he was helping to arrange.

I leant forward so I was folding my arms on his bed and the two of us shared a long and complicated look which I shan't try to describe. After a while, feeling far more comfortable now I was closer to John, I dropped my head into my arms and drifted off to sleep just like that.

'I love you.'

To this day, I'm not sure if those words I heard were a whisper from a dying man to his sleeping lover, or a figment of my exhausted mind.

As I awoke from a dream of nothingness, reality began to blur. I was conscious of a weight upon my head, a molto allegro of a beeping noise leading to the crescendo of approaching footsteps.

My eyes snapped open and in one instant I realised everything. I didn't need any proof, I just knew.

John was dead.

His hand, which had somehow come to be laid upon my head, had slipped to my neck and was already cold and yellowing. Thin purple veins branched out randomly over his neck and seemed to lead nowhere at all. His eyes unseeingly bore into my own as I was pushed away by nurses and doctors convinced they could resurrect him.

To this day the knowledge that John's hand was on my head as he died haunts me. Had he been trying to wake me up, had he known he was dying? Perhaps he'd fallen asleep as well, and his hand had simply drifted to me out of habit.

I would have had him with me for the rest of my days.

The two of us would have grown old together, our memories stretched out into infinity, as numerous as sunsets or broken waves on the shore. The concerto that was our relationship ended with his life that day, and my heart was to suffer the same fate as his promise to be there when I awoke.

Mycroft and Mrs Hudson arrived later that day. Later came Lestrade, then Sarah who remained John's friend for years, and Donovan and Molly.

In that look I shared with John, we had agreed to call and tell everyone the next morning. We had planned for him to be alive.

Harry, her wife and their daughter arrived to sign some important family documents which, due to the lack of legality, I was not permitted to. The days blurred together and I found sleep in odd places, like John's old armchair or the carpet in front of the fireplace. When I slept in these places, the dreams would stay away and I could distract my thoughts from inevitably taking me to him.

It was only two days after his death that I cracked.

The first tears came when I saw Harry's daughter holding her uncle's hand. He would never see her grow up as he had so wanted to. Mycroft was quick to steer me away when he saw the tell-tale blinking which meant tears were not far away.

I wept on my brother' shoulder. Had he not been there I would have wept still.

Everything I lived for had slowly changed from just the work, to just him. He had encompassed my every wish, my every desire and he had gone one month too early. As I lay in the armchair, not sleeping, I had imagined the things we could do in that month. We would visit Westforth manor, stay with Mycroft and my parents, cook a last meal in the apartment, play cards until early in the morning, deduce the stories of people passing by Baker street, write letters and ultimately live out his last month indulging ourselves in each other. He had not survived the first night, and that was what outraged me to the point of crying in front of my older brother. I simply did not, and do not care about it anymore. It being the Holmes family hierarchy, the ridiculous assumption that age means maturity and the need to be cold hearted to the point where my shoulders were granite and my face a stoic mask of apathy.

Mrs Hudson and Mycroft sorted out the funeral arrangements, and I was left mainly to my grief. My grief and I, I found, took up an entire room. Every once and a while I would emerge from upstairs and find people leaving rooms as I entered to make way for my dark companion. Perhaps it was my eyes that gave him away. I was told by Molly that I looked sad when I thought John couldn't see. Lately, that's been all the time.

His money and things were left mainly to Harry, and one of his army buddies with whom he had not spoken to for a good fifteen years. I suppose that is what comes of feeling no need to update one's will. I was told they had found a journal, in it were his clinic lists, notes about patients, dates with Stanford and Lestrade, and a letter to me.

My stony composure didn't falter as I took the slim book from the Watson' lawyer.

Later that night, about four days after, I opened it and found myself quite unprepared for the contents.

_Hello Sherlock,_

_I'm writing this at the hospital. I've just gotten an MRI and you're probably on a plane from New Zealand at the moment so I've got a while at least. By now you'll know about the stroke, about my diagnosis. That's the problem with you being so bloody smart. I really don't know what to write that you don't already know. _

_In my current, shall we say: longitudinally compromised state, my promise of forever and undying love has little resonance however I hope you'll accept it. For as long as I live, a year, a month, one night, I will love you more than I have loved anything or anyone before. I hope you know that you mean my happiness. I need only think of your name and a silly grin spreads across my face. Even after ten years, I still love you, Sherlock._

_I have a confession to make._

_I honestly have always thought that Anderson's a bit of a bastard, I don't know why but everything he says gets on my tits, also promise me you'll finally tell him the thing with the car stereo, he still doesn't know. When/if you do, I'll be right there laughing with you._

_I know this next bit will sound silly, but it needs to be said. If you ever feel compelled to find someone else, move on, settle down, have kids , you have my blessing. And no awkward waiting period either, whenever you're ready, you go for it._

_This will also sound silly but it's a bit worrying for me. I don't want you to become religious or spiritual now that I'm gone. I know it sounds awful of me but I'm dead so I don't give a fuck. That isn't you Sherlock, and I don't want my death to change who you are. I'm gone. I'm not in paradise, Sherlock, I was already there when I had this bloody stroke. Don't try to bring me back, no séances, mind readers, clairvoyants etc. You can leave my ghost out of it too because, baby, if I'm haunting anyone, it's you. _

_Sorry I can't be there for you anymore,_

_I still love you._

_John_

I flipped frantically through the rest of the book, my tears staining little circles in the pages as I found nothing.

In music, a coda comes at the end of the piece. The song is played through to the end, and then repeated. But instead of how the song ended before, how it was meant to end, the musician goes to the Coda which takes him to _fine. _

I have finished now, John.

This is my Coda.

This is my note.


End file.
